Forced in from the cold, spy feels the heat

A couple's secret life is now an open book, write Douglas Jehl and David Stout.

The standard for US operatives who pretend to be diplomats or other employees was not an option for Valerie Plame, people who knew her said.

As a covert operative who specialised in nonconventional weapons and sometimes worked abroad, she passed herself off as a private energy expert, what the agency calls non-official cover.

That changed in July, when her identity as a CIA officer was reported in a syndicated column by Robert Novak.

Novak, however, maintains his role has been "distorted".

"My role and the role of the Bush White House have been distorted and need explanation," he wrote in The Washington Post on Wednesday. "First, I did not receive a planned leak," he wrote. "Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of [former ambassador Joseph] Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret."

But Mr Wilson, a retired ambassador, has accused the White House of releasing her name as a way of discrediting him after he had questioned intelligence reports that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger.

Mr Wilson, 53 , met Ms Plame, 40, in early 1997 at a party in Washington, he said on Wednesday in an interview in his office. No response came from a telephone message left at their house in Washington, and Mr Wilson said his wife had instructed him to say that she would chew off her right arm before she talked to anybody from the press.

Mr Wilson proudly showed off photographs of Ms Plame, calling her a real-life Jennifer Garner, the actress who plays a spy on the television series Alias and whom the CIA has enlisted as a spokeswoman to appeal to recruits.

He would not allow publication of the photographs and asked visitors to protect the privacy of their three-year-old twins.

"In her business, people get very good about sticking to their story," said Mr Wilson, who has told friends that when they were dating Ms Plame told him about her true vocation only because he, too, had a high-level security clearance as a political adviser to the American general who was commanding US forces in Europe.

With that story in tatters, Mr Wilson said: "We were at a reception the other night, and all people wanted to talk about was her clandestine career.

"Her comment was, 'That's not something I discuss, even at work'. But it's been difficult. You have to go back and say to people that, 'All those years that you thought of me as an energy analyst, I was really something else.' You have to build back the trust."

As for Ms Plame's work, Wilson said: "Her career as a clandestine officer is over."